


Unfinished Business

by havisham



Category: DCU (Comics)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Canonical Character Resurrection, Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-08
Updated: 2015-01-08
Packaged: 2018-03-06 15:30:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,373
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3139442
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/havisham/pseuds/havisham
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jason Todd has been dead for almost twenty years, now.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Unfinished Business

He woke up to a mouthful of dirt and smashed up head, jangling thoughts blaring out again after a decades-long sleep. Thoughts turned into words, and words became shouts. They ripped from his still-raw throat. _“Bruce?!”_

But no, he was alone in the dark, with no sound around him except for his own panicked breathing. It was wet too, he felt it as his hands slid from his chest. Closed, closed, he was closed in, there was no way out. Panic slammed heavily against his still flickering consciousness. If he didn’t get out of here right now, he would die. He would die, again. 

It was nighttime when he broke through the surface. He had used the belt-buckle on his suit, and then his hands, his still-almost skeletal fingers poking through the ragged flesh. He crawled away from his grave with both hands scraping against the soft dirt until he came upon a bank of soft grass, next to a double grave, of a man and wife, side by side. for eternity. 

The grave and its inhabitants, the angel, were next to his own. Were they his? Were they his parents?

_No. No parents. No one, no one._

It was all echoes, nothing stayed put. But the grass was cool and slightly wet against his skin. He lay there face down, for a long time. 

Breathing. It was painful, it hurt. Being alive _hurt._

Slowly, the noise of Gotham came on around him, like a radio slowly coming into tune. The graveyard where he had been buried was located on the bluffs outside the city, and the roar of traffic and screeching sirens were carried here on a soft breeze. It was summer, and the heat was a heavy blanket wrapped around the city and pressed down on Jason’s struggling body. 

_Go back,_ something whispered in his ravaged brain. _You shouldn’t be. It’s too late._

_Go back, go back, go back._

But he couldn’t, he didn’t. He tried getting up, but ended up sprawled on the ground again and again. He got up, every time. Stumbling across the lawn, he ran into to headstones, his vision was blurred and filmed. When he got to the gates of the cemetery (there were locked, he rattled them in frustration), there was a sweep of a flashlight on the edges of the cemetery. It was coming towards him. 

He pressed his back into the iron bars of the gate and tried to remember. Scaling fences. Easy trick. A memory came back, just one. He was small, but light. There was a chain-link fence then, and a bad guy getting away. His shoes gripped better than he’d thought they would. He did it then. 

He could. He could do it now. 

He climbed the fence, he climbed it and he ran down the dark road until his knees gave out, just as a car’s headlights flooded the road. He froze and braced for a hit, but it never came. He collapsed on the hot hood of the car. 

The driver and passenger scrambled out, shouting. A young man’s voice rose to an incredible, unbelieving pitch. “Oh my _fucking_ God! A zombie!”

 

*****

Rebirth, again. 

The Lazarus Pit hissed around him, leaching into his skin, soaking into the soft tissues of his body, its magic running through his veins, fused into his bones. For a moment, he was there, suspended in the Pit, and his mind was scrubbed clean. He was nothing; the Pit, everything. 

But then, in a rush, it came back, _he_ came back. Every memory, every thought. He was Jason Todd, child of Willis Todd and Catherine Todd. And then there was Sheila, his birth-mother, his betrayer. 

Sheila’s face was the last thing he had seen when he died. 

And Talia was the first thing he saw when he was reborn, as she pulled him out of the Lazarus Pit, gasping at the sudden slap of cold against his skin. She wrapped him with a towel and chided him gently, her fear tightly coiled around her. “Really, Jason, the idea’s to have a quick dip into the Pit, not to treat it like a hot tub.” 

And he laughed against her chest, to stop himself from screaming, _Oh God, oh God, oh_ Jesus, _I can still feel it in me!_

Talia’s lips brushed against his burning forehead. “Dress. We have to go.” 

Talia didn’t let go of his arm until they got to the edge of the forest and the ground dropped off steeply. 

She handed him a backpack, and kissed him. 

“You remain unavenged,” she said and pushed Jason off the cliff, and into the sea. 

 

*****

_Fuck_ , but he was getting sick of this resurrection business. 

He had been dead and now he was alive, one century had ended and another began and here he was. Jason sucked in the smoke of his cigarette and let it rest in his lungs for a moment before releasing it through his teeth. The carton was plastered with warnings and crossbones, and so appropriate. Downstairs, a heavy bass rattled the house, and fine particles of dust fell on the bed and on his face. 

He breathed it into his lungs (fuck his lungs), and tried to think. 

Taped to the wall were the photographs that Talia had given him earlier that day, sliding them across the table in a manila envelope, like he was an assassin and she, a client. But Talia could always get better assassins than he (Jason was still learning), and besides, she never hesitated to get her own (lovely, manicured) hands dirty. 

There were fine lines at the corner of Talia’s eyes and mouth, especially when she smiled at Jason, and her light brown hair was getting lighter, year by year, changes that she thought Jason didn’t notice.

But Jason did; and he thought about Talia a lot. 

He stubbed the cigarette on the wooden headboard and turned his attention back to the photographs on the wall. They were old, some dating back from a year or so after he had died. In each, there was two figures, darting across the frame, smiles all around. 

There they were, together again. The Dark Knight and the Boy Wonder, Batman and Robin. 

Was this what Peter Pan felt like seeing his mom cradling a new baby? Jason didn’t know how he could have stopped himself from breaking more than a few windows. 

Now, Jason knew those scaly panties wouldn’t fit anymore. He was grown up, practically. But. It was more upsetting that it should be, it hurt that it should hurt. 

“He waited a fucking year,” Jason said aloud. “Less than a year. Couldn’t let the suit go cold.” 

There was even a clipping of how Bruce had managed to adopt Tim in the late nineties, but frankly, just looking at the accompanying cover turned his stomach, so he had left it in the envelope. 

Tim was everything Jason hadn’t been. Tim was everything that Jason never could be. 

Except --"He’s retired,” Talia had told him, watching Jason’s reaction. “There’s a different Batman now, and a different Robin. Younger, fitter. Better.” Talia smiled faintly as she said this, and Jason felt a bright flare of suspicion at her words. 

There was something she wasn’t telling him. 

Finally, he asked, “What happened to Bruce?” 

Talia shrugged. “Perhaps he is dead.” 

And no, Jason couldn’t believe for a minute that Bruce might be dead. It was impossible. Bruce wasn’t the kind to die. Not him. He and the Joker, the rules didn’t touch them. 

Finally, Jason swallowed hard and grinned up at Talia. 

The rules didn’t apply to him either. Not anymore. 

“Where is he?”

Talia gave him a bright, spiky smile. “That’s what you’re going to find out.” 

*****

Jason went back to Gotham with the taste of Talia still in his mouth. The city glowed below him, beautiful and malevolent. Smoke rose with the wind and he closed his eyes. 

_Home._

Jason twitched. He needed another smoke. The thing that had come with him through death and through the Pit flared again in the back of his mind.

It imagined Gotham in flames. It imagined Bruce dead, by Jason’s hand. 

Jason smiled. He had work to do.

**Author's Note:**

> Whoa, blast from the past! In my continuing effort to clear out my WIP folder, you get this, my dear readers. I wrote the vast chunk of it back in 2012, when I was heavily involved in the DCU comics fandom - Batfam edition. Originally, I had envisioned this as a sprawling epic about Jason coming to grips with dying in 1988 and coming back to life in 2006 (he listens to a lot of Nine Inch Nails, especially this [song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQcMQ4LYiNQ), ofc) but sprawling epics and I just don't mix.
> 
> And plus, the reboot happened and my interest in the DCU kind of ... died.
> 
> So this is it! The last hurrah! (I wish I could finish that 63!Bats story, but I think that's destined to be a WIP forever.) 
> 
> Thank you to litrator for a super-fast beta!


End file.
